Ralph Shaw was an academic librarian, an educator, and in 1950, the founder of Scarecrow press. He was known as an outspoken guy who forged his career more on the basis of saying what he thought than making friends. I first read about him in Ken Kister’s biography of Eric Moon, which is a great book for learning about the library scene of the mid-20th century. Ralph Shaw’s efforts have inspired me as I have been building up Library Juice Press and Litwin Books along some of the same lines. The barriers to publishing were higher then, and came down most significantly around 1990, when the cost of printing dramatically dropped and many small presses such as mind sprouted up. The way he did it at that time though, as an academic librarian jumping into the scholarly book market, was a method that still applies in my case: operating on extremely low overhead and hustling to find good books that major publisher either miss or don’t want to risk their less-efficient money on. (Don’t read into that that Library Juice Press has lower standards than other publishers in the field. On the contrary, we have directed several projects to better-known publishers over quality concerns, who have taken them on.)

All of this is to introduce a link to an old article that is now freely available on the web: “To Remember Ralph Shaw,” from Current Contents #23, June 5, 1978. I am not sure why the library at U Penn has posted the article, but I’m glad that they did. The article is from Eugene Garfield’s regular column, titled, “Essays of an Information Scientist.” (Eugene Garfield founded ISI.)

Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age

Authors: Michael Bugeja and Daniela Dimitrova
Price: $18.00
Published: Summer 2010
ISBN: 978-1-936117-14-7
Printed on acid-free paper

A decade ago, most research was done in the library rather than through its Web site, and scholars, editors, graduate directors and librarians were meticulous about the integrity of footnotes. They knew that citation was the backbone of research, from agronomy to zoology in the sciences and from art history to Zen studies in the humanities. The footnote upheld standards because it allowed others to test hypotheses or replicate experiments. In sum, the footnote safeguarded scientific method and peer review upon which academe is based, from papers by first-year and transfer students to books by postdoc and professor.

Since 2003, authors Michael Bugeja and Daniela Dimitrova (Iowa State University of Science and Technology) have been at the forefront of research on the erosion of online footnotes and its implication for scholarship. Their research has been showcased in The Chronicle of Higher Education and a number of academic journals, including The Serials Librarian, portal: Libraries and the Academy, New Media and Society and Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, among others. Their book documents the vanishing act in flagship communication journals and provides readers with methods to mitigate the effect.

Michael Bugeja is director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University where he also serves on the board of the Institute of Science and Society. He is the author of 20 books, including the acclaimed Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age (Oxford Univ. Press, 2005) and Living Ethics across media platforms, and writes for several magazines, including The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. His comments about ethics appear in Columbia Journalism Review, American Journalism Review, Quill, Editor & Publisher and other publications.

Dr. Dimitrova’s research focuses on Information and Communication Technologies, Internet Diffusion, and Political Communication (ICTs). Her dissertation examined Internet adoption in the post-communist countries and proposed a multidimensional framework to predict Internet diffusion globally. Another interest is online news coverage of conflict (wars and terrorist attacks).

She Was a Booklegger: Remembering Celeste West

Editors: Toni Samek, Moyra Lang and K.R. Roberto
Price: $30.00
Published: June 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9802004-9-2
Printed on acid-free paper

She Was a Booklegger: Remembering Celeste West is a compilation of reflections and tales from friends and other admirers who were influenced and inspired by this larger than life feminist librarian, lesbian, publisher, and activist. Celeste passed away in San Francisco on January 3, 2008 at the age of 65. She was a pioneering progressive librarian and one of the founders of the Bay Area Reference Center (BARC), Booklegger Press, Synergy [Magazine], and Booklegger Magazine. She was also co-editor of the now classic title Revolting Librarians. From 1989 until 2006, Celeste worked as the library director at the San Francisco Zen Center. She was a radical library worker whose practice challenged established library traditions by encouraging librarians to speak up about the need for systematic change. West initiated questions and challenged assumptions (such as library neutrality) that continue to be central issues examined in critical librarianship today. However, while Celeste released a lot of work to the world as author and editor, not much was ever shared about her as subject. This memorial volume provides a written record for those who wish to learn about this remarkable woman.

The publishing industry has some very separate parts to it. Trade publishing is the biggest, and is what most people think of when they think of “book publishing.” In the trade book market, quantity is everything. The price point for a book is low and the profit margins are very small. Publishers often pay authors large advances, try to sell a lot of copies in bookstores, and spend a lot on advertising. It is a big business and one that has not been faring well of late, as competition for readers’ eyeballs has been increasing. (I am not looking at ebooks as a separate sector in competition with trade books, but as a part of the publishing industry in each of its sectors.)

Scholarly and professional publishing is a bit different. Quantities of books sold are much lower. Where a trade book may need to sell 10,000 copies to be worth the publisher’s time, academic publishers use a business model wherein sales of 500 copies are often sufficient for profitability. That means that prices are much higher. Usually, scholarly books are priced for a customer base of libraries rather than individuals. The same is true for professional books published by the likes of Neal-Schuman. Where a trade book can be had for $12, a scholarly or professional book is going to cost $50 to $100 in hardcover, and $30 to $60 in paperback. With such small and specialized audiences, those kind of prices are a necessity for most scholarly publishers. Some university presses have begun publishing trade-like titles in order to reach out to a bigger market, and set prices closer to trade book prices for the paperback editions of those titles, but seldom less than $25. Another aspect of the difference between trade publishing and scholarly publishing is that bookstores typically get a discount from publishers of 45%, where vendors of scholarly books typically only get a 20% discount.

At Litwin Books and Library Juice Press we are publishing scholarly and professional books, but we’re doing it with a low overhead in our operations, which enables us to set prices that are affordable to individuals, and not just libraries. In this way we are mirroring what Scarecrow Press did in their early days. Our prices are not as low as trade book prices, and we are not spending money on a lot of advertising or giving big discounts in the hope of bookstore sales, so our business model is more like that of other academic publishers. But we want our titles to be titles that you can go and buy. All of our books have been paperbacks so far, with prices ranging from $12 for our tiniest book to $45 for the longest one.

We change our pricing policy a bit for ebook titles sold to libraries through ebrary. Those books are for a library market only, so the prices reflect what the hardcover prices would be if we published hardcover editions. In the future we will also be offering ebooks to consumers on a number of platforms. We anticipate that the prices of those ebooks will be lower than our current paper book prices.

We are having a busy Spring, getting a handfull of books ready for publication. Take a look at our books on offer to see what we have been doing.

Today’s New York Times has an informative little item comparing the environmental impact of producing an ipad versus that of a paper book: “How Green is My iPad?“

Books from Library Juice Press and Litwin Books are now available to libraries in ebook form through ebrary.

ebrary (lower case like bell hooks) is one of the major ebook vendors, and has a tight relationship with YBP, being integrated into their Gobi acquisitions platform. We are very happy to be working with them and getting our books out to libraries in ebook form.

Personally, I’m not crazy about web-based ebooks for sustained reading, but find they work well for looking up information on a few pages. As a publisher though (business owner) I am very glad to be able to sell ebooks to libraries, because I know many libraries have a mandate to spend a certain (growing) amount on ebooks.

As a small publisher in the library field I take inspiration from the history of Scarecrow Press, which I first learned about in Ken Kister’s biography of Eric Moon (Eric Moon: The Life and Library Times, McFarland Publishers, 2002). I’ve just dug up a 1985 article about the history of Scarecrow Press, written by Moon (who joined the press as its President when it was bought by Grolier) and published in Libraries Unlimited’s Library Science Annual. I am sharing an excerpt here so that you will understand why I feel that Library Juice Press is part of a tradition, and to share a bit of information about a hero of mine in library history.

The Scarecrow Press crept quietly onto the publishing scene over three decades ago [article copyright 1985 -RL], its first book emerging in 1950 from the basement of the founder’s home. That first book, appropriately, was Hessel’s History of Libraries, translated by Reuben Peiss. It was appropriate because the founder and first president of the Press was himself a major figure in the history of libraries: Ralph R. Shaw, a brilliant, contentious dynamo of a man, “a sometimes iconoclast,” and an original thinker who left his imprint on libraries, library education and theory, the profession, and publishing so indelibly that there are few, before or since, who could be said to have matched his contributions.

Shaw started Scarecrow as a hobby, but also, as was the case with many of his ventures, to prove a point. One only had to describe something as impossible to launch Shaw into action. In an RQ article in 1966 he said: “If there is a single thing upon which the publishing fraternity is in agreement it is that the scholarly book of limited distribution cannot be published without subsidy.” Scarecrow was his way of proving, once again, that the impossible could be accomplished.

Robert C. Binkley, in what Shaw considered a classic work, had concluded, “… under present publishing practices … no book can be expected to get the publisher out of the red until sales have passed well beyond the 1,000 mark.” (And this judgment was made during the depths of the Depression!) The essence of Binkley’s argument was that there are certain fixed coasts – editorial, composition, overhead, etc. – that do not vary with the size of the edition, and that these costs must be distributed over the total number of copies sold. If a book sells 50,000 copies, the fixed costs are spread so widely as to be negligible; if the edition sells 250 copies, the part of the fixed costs that must be charged against each copy becomes prohibitive.

Shaw set out to attack what he called the “villain of the piece”: those fixed costs. Before his first book was published he was talking one day with his friend and colleague, author-editor Earl Schenk Miers, who had been associated with the Rutgers University Press. Describing his new venture, Shaw detailed how he intended to avoid “excessive office costs, excessive editorial costs, general trade advertising and the building up of staff, which would then continue to have to be supported.” Miers broke in, “You’re talking about a scarecrow: it has no overhead, it pays no rent, it is not responsible for anybody’s future clothing or shelter. It’s a scarecrow.” And thus was Shaw’s new baby christened.

My friend Ramona Islam shared with me an interesting blog post by chemist Jean-Claude Bradley, discussing the reliability (or non-reliability) of scientific reference sources that are considered trusted within the discipline. I find it especially interesting in terms of implications for projects like Wolfram Alpha and other attempts to build automated reasoning systems around inconsistently-defined and questionable data.

Byron Anderson’s Bibliographic and Web Tools for Alternative Media has just been updated.

This is a good collection development resource for librarians and others who want tools for going beyond the usual lists and collection development resources, especially for finding books on the political fringes or otherwise outside of the usual academic or corporate channels.

For fun on a Friday, a couple of recent New Yorker “Shouts and Murmurs” columns related to our world:

Live Your Life

and

Subject: Our Marketing Plan

ITHACA, NY — Nominations for the 2009 Izzy Award are officially open. The annual award for special achievement in independent media — named after legendary muckraker I. F. “Izzy” Stone — is a project of the Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM) at Ithaca College. Last year’s inaugural award was shared by blogger Glenn Greenwald and “Democracy Now!” host/executive producer Amy Goodman.

“The award honors journalists who follow in the independent footsteps of Izzy Stone,” said Jeff Cohen, PCIM’s founding director. “Our 2008 Izzy winners, Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman, personify the growing clout of independent media today in exposing government and corporate misconduct, media bias and human rights violations.”

For more information on the award, visit http://www.ithaca.edu/indy/izzy.

In 1953, during the depths of the anti-communist witch hunts, Stone launched “I. F. Stone’s Weekly,” through which he challenged official deception, McCarthyism and racial bigotry. In 1999, a poll of prominent journalists ranked the publication as number 16 among the “Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century.” Stone died in 1989.

I. F. Stone’s son, Jeremy, participated in last year’s award ceremony in Ithaca. Days later, Greenwald and Goodman discussed the award and the importance of independent media on the PBS television program “Bill Moyers Journal.”

Award winners are chosen by a panel of judges who have expertise in independent media. As with last year, joining Cohen on the panel are communications professor and author Robert W. McChesney, and Linda Jue, director and executive editor at the G. W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism. The winner will be announced and the award bestowed in February or March.

This year’s Izzy Award will be given for work published, broadcast or posted in 2009 by an independent media outlet, journalist or producer. The award may relate to a single piece or a body of work. Journalists, academics and the public at large — as well as the judges — may submit nominations by the January 12, 2010, deadline.

Nominations should be submitted via a brief e-mail that includes supporting Web links and/or attached materials to Brandy Hawley at bhawley@ithaca.edu. Only if e-mail is not possible, nominations can be mailed to Brandy Hawley, Ithaca College, Park Center for Independent Media, 953 Danby Road, Ithaca, NY 14850.

Launched in 2008, the Park Center for Independent Media is a national center for the study of media outlets that create and distribute content outside traditional corporate systems and news organizations. Located within Ithaca College’s Roy H. Park School of Communications, the PCIM examines the impact of independent media institutions on journalism, democracy and a participatory culture.

Press Release

Baker & Taylor Acquires Blackwell North America
and James Bennett

– Blackwell U.K. Acquires B&T’s Lindsay and Croft in the U.K. As Part of Deal. Customers to Benefit from More than 300 Years of Bookselling Excellence –

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – December 7, 2009 – Baker & Taylor Inc. today announced it has acquired Blackwell Book Services North America (BNA) and Blackwell’s Australia-based James Bennett bookseller.

Also as part of the deal, Blackwell U.K. will acquire Baker & Taylor’s Lindsay and Croft business in the U.K.

“Our organizations share a passion for bookselling, a rich history and a reputation for superior customer service,” said Tom Morgan, CEO of Baker & Taylor. “With our collective knowledge and breadth of scholarly inventory and value-added services, academic libraries around the world will be extremely well served.”

The combination of Baker & Taylor’s YBP Library Services and Blackwell’s North American and Australian businesses brings together the world’s most respected and trusted academic and research library service providers. The shared commitment to service through partnerships with libraries, consortia and suppliers, coupled with outstanding reputations for professionalism, knowledge and integrity, will allow the expanded U.S.-based YBP Library Services to better meet the rapidly evolving information and workflow needs of academic libraries around the globe for years to come.

In addition to the acquisitions, Baker & Taylor’s YBP Library Services and Blackwell U.K. have entered into a strategic sourcing agreement under which YBP Library Services will source all U.K.-published academic material from Blackwell U.K., and Blackwell U.K. will source all U.S.-published academic material from YBP Library Services. This agreement will enable both businesses to offer their respective customers all over the globe the largest and most in-depth supply of scholarly materials.

Andrew Hutchings, Group CEO of Blackwell, said, “I am confident that this reciprocal agreement will enable Blackwell and YBP Library Services to build on their respective strengths and continue to deliver the high quality services that academic libraries around the world require.”

With this acquisition, Baker & Taylor’s YBP Library Services will continue to offer the collection development and workflow services – print and electronic approval plans, firm and rush orders, continuations and technical services – that customers have relied on for years.

Additional services that were previously unique to one provider, such as Blackwell’s Table of Contents Catalog Enrichment Service or YBP Library Services’ GOBI3 bibliographic service, will soon be offered to all customers. By combining mutual best practices, the companies can provide a superior level of customer service that was never before possible.

###

Amy Baldwin
Communications Manager
Baker & Taylor
p 704-998-3136
c 704-519-6232
www.baker-taylor.com

There’s a book idea we’ve been kicking around here at Litwin Books, and we need an author. I don’t want to completely disclose the idea for this book, but I want to say enough to potentially find the right author. It will be a reference book that takes a skeptical view of commonly-encountered statistics and facts. I want to find an author who is good with social science research methods and able to see the problems behind factual claims across a range of issues and subject matter. I want to find someone who has these skills and has a healthy dislike for the way that public discourse is distorted by misinformation, bias, and ideology. My hope is for a book that has something to offend everyone.

Any takers? Please contact me at rory at litwinbooks.com.

This post presents a second look at the familiar story regarding the transformation of information consumers into information producers and the idea that this shift is making book publishing companies obsolete. While the effects of the technology revolution have certainly empowered individuals, this common story overlooks some important aspects of the role that publishers play, and puts too much faith in a leveled-out, organization-less system. This essay presents an argument for the continuing value of the publishing house as an important factor in an information ecology.

I would like to point out the following roles that book publishing companies play in the book market:

• a filtering or gatekeeping role, by controlling the titles that reach market channels according to quality and marketability;
• an editing role, aimed at improving the quality of authors’ works;
• a production role, which includes design and printing according to better standards of quality and efficiency;
• a marketing role, which consists in organizing the information that makes the book market function by building title lists according to an editorial scope and disseminating that information to the appropriate audiences;
• a creative role, in generating and nurturing projects;
• and a financial role, by rewarding and sometimes financially supporting its authors.

A final consequence of the technology revolution for publishers may be that we will have smaller and more numerous firms selling to smaller audiences, but publishers will continue to play an important role in the book world, both print and electronic.

The filtering role

The period of the internet boom has been a period in which the filtering or “gateway” role of publishers, and other institutions as well, has been coming under pressure. This development has been welcomed by many people who have found a feeling of empowerment in it. The argument was made beginning in the 1980s that because publishers were driven by profit and owned by large corporations they filtered out important works that were critical, challenging, or innovative. As this argument was being made a number of trends were noticeable. First, small, independent publishers sprang up like wildflowers as alternatives to the mega-publishers, and then either died off or matured into important venues for critical, challenging, and innovative works. Within a decade or two, the internet emerged as an alternative means for individuals to make their voices heard, and digital technology enabled individuals to self-publish books more easily, as well as lowering the barriers to entry for new publishing companies. It was the dawn of the era of the consumer as publisher, and along with it came a suspicion of expertise and of the elitist role of the gatekeeper, the professor, and the technocrat. People began to put more trust in “people like themselves” than in people whom society’s institutions held up as experts or arbiters of quality or truth. We may have reached a point where this trend has reached it limit and is reversing, now that Americans have elected a President who represents technocratic competence rather than good ole’ boy common sense, and it is now mostly right wing crackpots who complain about the “elitists” in gatekeeping roles.

As the new information landscape has settled into a more or less stable framework, we have formed a new set of expectations:

• Many of the more interesting books on niche subject areas are published by small, independent publishers, and being a small, independent publisher in itself does not indicate lower standards of quality but simply a narrower projected audience for its titles;
• The trade market, which is focused on developing blockbuster titles and selling them in bookstores, is in a state of decline that is likely permanent;
• The internet has become the default way to buy books, whether in or out of print;
• The ways of finding out about books have multiplied;
• People read fewer books;
• While book publishing has been democratized, there is general recognition that The Memoirs of an Average Joe From Racine and the millions of self-published titles like it are not worth reading by people who are not friends or family of said Average Joe;
• The lowering of the barriers to entry in the industry has meant more titles, more niche foci, and smaller print runs for the average book; and
• Consequently, the average publishing house is less capitalized, which has the effect of reducing the overall financial support for writing as a profession, and encourages writing as an amateur pursuit.

Whether a publisher is trying to sell 50,000 copies of a book on the trade market or 500 copies of a book in a niche or academic market, it has an audience in mind that understands quality in a particular way and trusts the publisher’s brand to deliver that form of quality in its offerings. “Quality” may have more possible meanings than it once did in the book market, but it still means something to all but the most epistemologically anarchistic readers. If a book is self-published and has not been vetted by some publisher’s editorial acquisitions process, then readers who manage to find out about it in some way – usually on a blog – will have fewer reasons to feel confident that it is a good book. Authors who successfully publish their own books are able to do so because they are well-enough known not to need a publisher’s imprimatur for their readers to feel this confidence. (Edward Tufte is not like your average iUniverse author.) This means that the role of publishers as gateways, even if these gateways are more numerous and based on a broader range of standards and ideas of the meaning of quality, remains important in the marketplace.

The editing and production roles

Publishers have a natural interest in maintaining a standard of quality in their offerings in all dimensions. This means not only accepting some works and not others, but also editing those works to improve them. It also means having systems and talent in place to do higher-quality book design and high quality printing in a cost-effective way, bringing prices to a level that makes good sense in the book market. An individual who self-publishes a novel may take advantage of an author services company such as iUniverse, and this will allow him to make a book that looks generally good, but his choices of cover art are extremely limited, there is no editorial assistance provided to him, and the final price of the book will be inflated.

The marketing role

In this new book world the multiplicity of sources of bibliographic information – blogs, online booksellers, etc. – has made the list-building role of a publisher somewhat less important than it was in the past, but has not eliminated it as the primary organizing function of the marketplace. If I am a book selector in the field of rhetoric, I will get catalogs sent to me from Parlor Press, among others; if I want books about baseball history, a publisher with a strong list in that area is McFarland. Many important publishers maintain series that readers and collectors can follow to keep up with a field. Even large publishing houses that develop bestselling titles tend to be known for certain kinds of works, genres, and subject matter. The publisher’s imprint can lead a reader or collector from one book to another by grouping works editorially. There is no equivalent for the organizational function of the publisher’s imprint in the world of self-publishing.

The grouping function of the publisher extends to its marketing and advertising efforts. A publisher may purchase advertising space in a venue that is relevant to its editorial scope, and use that space to lead readers to more than one book. This means that publishers can spend resources on marketing and advertising more efficiently than self-publishers can.

The creative role

The preceding may be obvious to many readers, but the creative role of publishers is less familiar to people. Acquisitions editors don’t only read submitted manuscripts and make decisions about them. They also generate ideas for books, find the right authors for them, and nurture the writing process. At Litwin Books and Library Juice Press, five of our seventeen books now in print originated with in-house ideas. Another seven were existing manuscripts that we uncovered in our wide research, and the remaining five were submitted to us cold. Most of our twenty or so forthcoming book projects got started in conversations between us and the authors. As I understand the book industry, this collaborative process of developing titles is common if not typical. The publisher contributes creativity coupled with a studied sense of what the book market needs. Often even the most creative people need encouragement or other people to “think with.” The publisher offers the author a creative partnership that helps to develop ideas and make them real.

The financial role

Some people who write books make a living from it, while others do not, and the difference is the most important line of separation between large trade publishers and smaller niche and academic publishers. A bestselling book can easily generate income for an author that is equivalent to that of a full time job, where sales of a 500 copies sold of a typical university press title generate merely supplemental income. A professor may be expected to write books as a part of her job, but with librarians or authors in other niche markets the relative lack of remuneration for significant labor is a problem in the present information ecology. Writers will write, and there are rewards other than money, but making a living is always a more important priority, and this limits what many writers are able to produce for small, independent publishers. Small publishers can reward authors financially to a degree, but not enough to support them doing it full time. However, the opportunities they can provide to authors are opportunities that may not have existed at all previously.

The meaning for libraries

The shift from larger to smaller publishers is mostly good for librarians. There used to be a strong complaint of de-facto censorship of library collection development as a result of large publishers’ domination of information channels. Over the past decade or so, however, professional tools for library collection development – distributors’ lists, approval plans, review sources, bibliographies, publishers’ websites – began to inform us to a greater and greater degree about the offerings of small, independent presses. The publisher’s roles as a filter or gatekeeper and as an organizer of title information have been essential in making these tools work in the context of a broader marketplace, by helping reviewers and vendors know where to look for the good stuff that is being published in this or that area. Ten years ago, a publisher with the profile of Litwin Books would probably not have been on a major vendor’s approval plan, but because vendors have recognized the role of smaller publishers in focusing on specific subject areas, Litwin Books and Library Juice Press are now on the core list of publishers of both Blackwell’s and Yankee Book Peddler, which means that our titles are included in approval-based book shipments. The main obstacles that small, independent publishers now face in reaching the library market are simply their narrower target audiences and competition with the numerous other publishers in the marketplace.

The democratization of publishing has opened up great possibilities for authors and ideas, but I believe we are bouncing off of its limits and seeing the need for organization, expertise, and intellectual soundness. Publishers offer gatekeeping based on a myriad of principles, according to their niche. They also offer quality control, efficient pricing, information channeling, creative partnerships with authors, and a way to reward intellectual work. The landscape for books and reading has changed, but the basic role of publishing companies is re-emerging as the theme of individual empowerment has come up against the need to bring quality to the surface.

There is something that people in the book world often don’t understand about copyright. When I say book world I mean librarians, booksellers, reviewers, researchers, authors, and sometimes publishers.

A question that people often want to know the answer to is “Who owns the copyright” to a work, because they may want to know if they are free to reproduce it without permission, or for some other reason. Someone with this question may look at the verso of the title page of the book and see that the copyright is owned by the author, and conclude from that that the author is the rights holder who has the authority to grant permission, etc.

In such a case the author indeed “owns the copyright,” but is not necessarily the rights holder concerning the rights in question.

Most contracts in the publishing world do not involve an actual transfer of the copyright to the publisher. That is quite rare.

To be the copyright owner of a work, which one automatically is when one creates a work in a fixed medium, means owning a bundle of rights regarding the publication and use of the work. Those rights can be split up and traded separately, and for limited time periods, through contractual relationships. So, typically, a publishing contract will give the publisher a limited set of rights for a limited time period, after which the contract might renew itself if no one objects. Those rights might include publication and sale in particular countries, translation into foreign languages, performance, adaptation, etc. Publisher’s contracts often include as many rights as possible, but usually for a limited duration.

What this means is that the copyright information on the verso of the title page of a book does not tell you who owns the rights to the work as they might concern you. Even if it states that the book is “Copyright Wanda Y. Datso, 2009,” the author may not be the rights holder in terms of your question. The only way to find out who owns a particular set of rights to a work is to look at the contracts between the author and other interested parties. Note that the original copyright owner may give up rights to more than one party in a variety of ways – non-exclusively, for limited time periods, and for limited kinds of rights (e.g. translation into particular languages), so more than one party may own different rights to a work at the same time. Also note that the separate rights under copyright can be sold, given away, lent, shared, inherited, under any legal arrangement that people devise.

I think the potential complexity of this tableau of rights is often not realized by researchers who want to find the rights holder to a work. The key things that people need to realize are that “owning the copyright” is not the same thing as being the rights holder, and that the distribution of rights is done through contracts, and can be accomplished in countless, creative ways. (After all, this is the basis of the Creative Commons licenses.)